Aaron MkII wrote:It was damn near a week before FEMA got in after Katrina, people had to form fucking militia to defend themselves and help each other. The responses aren't comparable. There's plenty to criticize Obama on without lying.

Yeah. A legion of canadian volunteers made it to New Orleans before FEMA did.

Oh no! The FEMA response in the east coast was not photograph perfect! Supply shortages and manpower constrain what they can do! The HORRORS!!!

Clean up Manhattan while people are starving in Queens and killing each other over flashlights and canned food in Red Hook. Distribute supplies to areas that don't need them while ignoring those that do. Close all shelters in Staten Island when the nor'easter came, abandoning the people to fend for themselves and leaving Occupy volunteers the only source of help.

Crossroads Inc. wrote:
The far right are practicing the time hounored skill of putting their heads in the sand and going "LA LA LA LA" by claiming that, because 'america' voted them back in control of the house, that this somehow 'prooves' that America is REALLY repudiating Obama and Democrates and endorsing Republicans views of never ever raising taxes, despite the fact that Poll after Poll after Poll show Americans in FAVOR Of higher taxes on the rich...

I know there's a lot of gerrymandering involved in why the house is still Republican, but it still looks like "america" voted back in a Republican controlled house - do explain (i'm not american) why this doesn't show that "america" broadly supports in some way Republican policies?

That is sort of missing the point, gerrymandering aside "America" is showing to more and more support tax icreases on the rich... The argument goes "Sure, raise taxes on the rich, just don't raise MY Taxes..."
These people may still vote Republican, but the thinking of taxes IS changing. mostly people are gettign really really pissed off at the rich in America. The problem is that the Republican leadership will go out of it's way to NEVER EVER raise taxes of any kind. ((Because lets face it, their REAL constituents are the Rich in America))

If 10,000 people showed up on a Republicans doorstep and all shouted "We want you to raise taxes on the rich!" They would pretend not to see it.

As for America as a whole supporting Republican policy, Well Crazy said it a great deal better then myself...

America is split about 50/50 population wise right now, and the Senate reflects this.. The house however shall almost ALWAYS lean Republican because of the idiotic way the districts are cut up. A state could have 10,000,000 Democrats and 500,000 Republicans... But thanks to gerrymandering, those 10,000,000 Democrats could be split among 10 different districts, giving the Republicans the advantage to win all the seats.

Right. It's also notable I think that 30 states (approx) are Republican governed - though of course in this case you have moderate republican governors due to geography. The thing about the cities - it seems that the tack being taken is that the cities get disproportionate effects on the Presidential race since it's winner take all for states, but conversely rural areas have disproportionate effects on the house.

For what its worth, I'm also not sure if a totally "fair" districting will be desirable, since thanks to FPTP and Winner takes all a fair distribution will lead instead to seats being dominated by the majority, leading to a lopsided legislature, correct?

I do know how to spell
AniThyng is merely the name I gave to what became my favourite Baldur's Gate II mage character

Over at SA there was some discussion regarding how/why that Colorado University model turned out to be so hilarious inaccurate. Something to do with overfitting but I'm not in a statistics class, "If you regress a formula that perfectly intersects (or even passes near) every single historical data point, even the outliers, then you're probably doing something wrong, and your method will lack the faintest whiff of predictive power.The Colorado professors seem not to have grasped either of this. Just looking at their paper, one can see that they attempted to estimate over 13 parameters using 8 elections worth of data, and without doing any model selection. Their current BS about 'oh, it must be Sandy' is frankly embarrassing."

What I didn't know until reading the Nate Silver thread, was that Nate already considers economic data, it just fades as polling data seems to already consider it as you get closer to election day and people make up their minds.

Dark Hellion wrote:
If what I know from Law and Order is true then everything you said is actually just business as usual.

Does anyone else on this board ever just get the impression that the true progressives just need to get laid more so they aren't bitchin' about little things so much...

I'm sorry, I'd love to get laid more, but working a full shift at a relief center after finishing at my regular job for the past two weeks means I don't have the time to do so.

Alyrium Denryle wrote:
Sources for those? I am curious.

You can read this, and this, and this and even today's NYT editorial. There is also my personal experience, and the experences of countless volunteers, with appeals like this.

Dear all, I spent my day today volunteering at the JASA Buildings in the Far Rockaways and wanted to share what I saw. First of all, here are some of the facts: there are approximately 700 senior citizens still stranded in these concrete high rises who have no power, heat or water; approximately 80% are Russian and do not speak adequate English. There were about 50-80 volunteers that I saw at any given time, which was nice to see, but most cannot communicate with the residents because only about a dozen spoke Russian. There is NO RED CROSS, FEMA, OR ANY OTHER GOVERNMENT AID AT ALL. These poor people have been abandoned there since the storm, which was a week ago! Without power, there is no elevators and there are anywhere between 12 and 22 floors per building. The stairways are pitch dark and freezing, the smell is unpleasant at best since there is no working plumbing. I saw some residents who are more or less mobile bring in buckets of ocean water to use to flush their bathrooms, but as you can imagine, with the mean resident age of about 80, most are not that capable of climbing the stairs. Many are bed bound and do have home attendants most of which are not very helpful or proactive in recruiting help. I did not see Doctors Without Borders as had been reported by the management company. The only medical professional I saw was an RN from a visiting nurse service who due to regulations and HIPPA could only see his actual patients. The volunteers were being mobilized by several religious organizations and grass roots campaigns such as the one we have here on Facebook. Today there was a command center thanks to a great guy, Ken Soloway, from Kips Bay Y and his troops which provided some order and it made a huge difference, but the system is far from perfect because there are no current protocols and resources to keep track of things, although they are developing it. There were also about 20 JASA employees, most of them just stood around watching us as if we were a traveling circus. There is a ton of clothing donations in a corner, but no one is sorting these bags. There was a huge pile of donated blankets, which were in high demand and were gone by the end of the day, so we need to keep them coming. They are currently organizing a large scale voluntary evacuation to a shelter at a Jewish Center in Brooklyn for tomorrow because of the bad weather on the way, so aside from providing warm meals and some necessities, our job was to try and convince these poor people to agree to evacuate. Some were happy to do so, others insisted to stay. I encountered a couple of residents who would evacuate, but did not want to leave their cats behind as we could not tell them how long the evacuation would last and since we were unaware they had pets, we had no way to know how to handle this situation. It just so happened that while voting today I ran into a girl from my vet’s office. I shared with her what I saw, and she promised to donate cat food to take there tomorrow as well as to take in the pets for the time being if we can convince the owners to let them care for them temporarily. I will try to do so tomorrow. I have to tell you that my overall impression is that the efforts are moving in the right direction and making a difference, but just the thought of the fact that it has taken a week for people to realize that no one was helping these elderly makes me want to cry. The management company was aware of the situation and I am appalled that they have taken no effort to recruit help or to repair their badly compromised facilities. From what I understand, it can be WEEKS before services are restored, so an ideal situation would be a complete evacuation, but that’s easier said than done.
To aid with evacuation efforts they need as many volunteers for tomorrow as they can get. Bilingual volunteers are invaluable. I will be driving there late morning if anyone from Queens needs a ride. If you are available and need a lift from anywhere else, please let me know as there are people driving in from all over and will be happy to carpool. As far as what they need, first and foremost its BLANKETS, FLASHLIGHTS AND BATTERIES. They also need paper towels, toilet paper, moist wipes, Russian newspapers to read, water, fruit, bread, stomach medications such as Pepcid, Immodium, and OTC Prevacid/Zegerid, etc as many have gotten food poisoning from eating spoiled food.
Thank you for reading my eye witness account and if you can help in any way, feel free to contact me directly.

SirNitram wrote:I am shocked and pleased to be VERY wrong about it being dragged out. I am Wrong. I'm sure there's some folks on the board who want to frame that.

Nah...given how the last several elections went, it was fully expected that Florida (among other states) would be drawn out. I think it's a very nice surprise that it turned blue and stayed blue by tens of thousands of votes.

So in the PV, Obama won by over Three Million votes Isn't that actually MORE then in 2008?

Also the Screaming about what is clearly a satirical story by a website which is basically the Onion but for the military, simply reconfirms just how out of touch the nuts on the right are Often people read crazy stuff and say 'Well they most be joking, or it must be satire" Well, when these people can't tell Satire from Real life, you KNOW they have a problem. Read the following Gem on the comments page:

You stand behind your elected president..... that is not the case here.... he was not elected, he took it.... look at the map and compare red to blue... the majority wanted Romney ..... and I pray this is all exposed so our rightful president sits in that oval office....

I'm democrat and Romney was robbed as was our nation of our real leader. If anyone feels can be okay with this, it is the real lack of patriotism ..... look at the outcome of the election... obama won only the States with no voter id required,

As the counts come in percentage we see that the suburban ares that took the swing States voted over 100% of population of legal voting age, the military was convieniently left out of this election, in October the election results were aired dated November 6 on the bottom of the screen on 2 different networks one for 17 seconds and the other for 19 seconds both matching eachother and are very comparable to the results of Tuesday. . .

We the people have to lay down our anger for party and come together in a unity under God for our Freedom that has been paid for in blood by the servicemen and woman who protect us... this is tyranny and dishonest and a slap in the face to all of us, in every party.... I can live with a lose, but I cant know that it was won by cheating and believe in my heart that is okay and not stand up and say this is wrong and our rightful president needs to take his place come January. . .

The people want peace and we want unity and we want liberty and justice for all.... we I feel that if Obama was a leader in his heart, he would say the same.

Crossroads Inc. wrote:So in the PV, Obama won by over Three Million votes Isn't that actually MORE then in 2008?

Ah, no...Obama crushed McCain by over 9 million votes (53% - 46%). Ballots are still being counted though, but I doubt that the margin will be that wide.

Still, three million is a lot, right?

Its essentially the same victory GWB got in 2004, which this election cycle strongly resembled in other ways. Obama had a much more favourable electoral geography that Bush though, so his EC margin was much larger.

Its just not nearly as big as last time, 2008 was a big a victory in vote terms as the first Bush's landslide in 1988.

Aaron MkII wrote:I'm pretty sure I asked this after Katrina but how can the most powerful nation on Earth be so fucking useless when this happens?

It can best be summed up as "Devil take the hindmost".

That lovely "American Dream" notion of lifting yourself up by your bootstraps, of coming to the New World and being a roaring success and living a great life? You've heard of the memes of self-reliance and self-initiative? The flip side is that if you don't become wildly successful there must be something wrong with you. The flip side is that the poor and the helpless are despised for being weak and unable. Those most in need are those most denied. It is a supremely unlovely and dark side of this nation.

One reason Americans are so insanely "productive" and work longer hours with fewer vacations than just about anyone else is that dark side of the nation scares the living fuck out of people because to a large extent there is no safety net. If you fall there is nothing and no one to catch you.

Thank you, fgalkin, for being one of those people large enough in spirit to fill in the gaps and fight the darkness. If only your willingness to step in was the norm instead of the exception.

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.

Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy

Flagg wrote:So apparently Romney cancelled all of the campaign credit cards before his staffers could use them to buy tickets home. Classy.

The Huffington Post has picked up on it, as has Esquire. Nobody seems to know if it was a conscious decision on Romney's part, or if the cards were always going to expire at midnight on November 6th and there was just a breakdown in communications somewhere. Either way, you'd think they could have budgeted for giving everyone who needed one a cab ride home after it was all over.

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

Replace "ginger" with "n*gger," and suddenly it become a lot less funny, doesn't it?
-- fgalkin

Flagg wrote:So apparently Romney cancelled all of the campaign credit cards before his staffers could use them to buy tickets home. Classy.

The Huffington Post has picked up on it, as has Esquire. Nobody seems to know if it was a conscious decision on Romney's part, or if the cards were always going to expire at midnight on November 6th and there was just a breakdown in communications somewhere. Either way, you'd think they could have budgeted for giving everyone who needed one a cab ride home after it was all over.

I was discussing this with a family friend and we were wondering if Mittens personally canceled the cards as an act of spite.

Of course, it could have been the businessman in Mittens wanting to prevent his staffers from taking advantage of campaign money to treat themselves. But you'd think he'd have the decency to see his staff got home safely.

If he did cancel them that night, then it shows how little he cared about the people working under him.

JME2 wrote:
I was discussing this with a family friend and we were wondering if Mittens personally canceled the cards as an act of spite.

Of course, it could have been the businessman in Mittens wanting to prevent his staffers from taking advantage of campaign money to treat themselves. But you'd think he'd have the decency to see his staff got home safely.

If he did cancel them that night, then it shows how little he cared about the people working under him.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say given Romney's response to a lot of things, it was a simple business decision. Throughout his campaign, I never got the sense that he was much of a people person, or considered people before a policy. He never seemed *evil*, he just seemed to lack a connection with the human race as a whole. The practical, business side of him probably reasoned that there was no more use for the cards, cancelled them, and didn't give it another thought.

JME2 wrote:
I was discussing this with a family friend and we were wondering if Mittens personally canceled the cards as an act of spite.

Of course, it could have been the businessman in Mittens wanting to prevent his staffers from taking advantage of campaign money to treat themselves. But you'd think he'd have the decency to see his staff got home safely.

If he did cancel them that night, then it shows how little he cared about the people working under him.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say given Romney's response to a lot of things, it was a simple business decision. Throughout his campaign, I never got the sense that he was much of a people person, or considered people before a policy. He never seemed *evil*, he just seemed to lack a connection with the human race as a whole. The practical, business side of him probably reasoned that there was no more use for the cards, cancelled them, and didn't give it another thought.

See, but the problem is that the kind of casual disregard for other human beings that shows IS evil. It's pretty much the definition of evil.

Flagg wrote:So apparently Romney cancelled all of the campaign credit cards before his staffers could use them to buy tickets home. Classy.

The Huffington Post has picked up on it, as has Esquire. Nobody seems to know if it was a conscious decision on Romney's part, or if the cards were always going to expire at midnight on November 6th and there was just a breakdown in communications somewhere. Either way, you'd think they could have budgeted for giving everyone who needed one a cab ride home after it was all over.

"Put. That credit card. Down. Cab rides home are for closers only. You think I'm fuckin' with you? I am not fuckin' with you..." --David Mamet's Glenromney Glen Ryan

"Do I really look like a guy with a plan? Y'know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! Y'know, I just do things..." --The Joker

Block wrote:
See, but the problem is that the kind of casual disregard for other human beings that shows IS evil. It's pretty much the definition of evil.

Evil is deliberately doing something harmful to someone else without a morally justifiable reason. Oversight or simply not being interested enough in the welfare of his campaign team to make certain they have a way home isn't evil. Shitty yes, but not evil. In fact, the latter option would fit just fine with the attitudes he displayed when he worked with Bain...

Now if he deliberately stranded them as revenge for "not winning him the election" then yes that's definitely evil.